Getting a Quick Answer in the Results

In a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, John Mueller mentioned that adding schema to your website will better help Google understand your page... and therefore may facilitate your page or content getting a featured snippet in the search results. The relevant conversation starts at 52 seconds into the video where Mueller says,

In general, it is important that we are able to kind of recognize the content properly on those pages. So using things like structured data markup could help us to better figure out which parts of the page are actually content and which parts aren't. So that's one thing I'd aim for...

As a caveat, Mueller mentioned that structured data markup does not guarantee that your site/content will be shown in a featured snippet (which Mueller described as showing up sometimes as a quick answer or bigger snippet). He also mentioned that it depends on what type of query is requested.

There is a great discussion on this topic in Barry Schwartz's article, where one SEO commented and shared information he learned at MozCon, saying,

Basically, you qualify for this featured snippet if your page is anywhere in the top 10 in a SERP for a given query. As we know, Google is trying to answer people's questions, so as Mueller mentions in the Google Hangout, this featured snippet deal really only applies to certain types of queries - informational queries like, how to do something or what the definition of something is etc. If your content answers the question of the searcher better than any of the others in the SERP, in theory, it could usurp all the pages that rank ahead of yours and get into that 0 Rank featured snippet position.